Lists and stuff (movies and tech and ...etc.)

Someday Blockbuster and Netflix's will be dead. The Internet will be fast enough that people won't want to pay the postage. The question is who will be the winner, and the timing of that.

• Hulu

The lists of good movies to see is endless:

• Metacritic (which also has a music list)
  
• ThemovieDB.org (TMDB) and IMDB
• netflix and Blockbuster have their own lists as well

As are the the lists of "useful websites", "useful plugins", etc:

• Telegraph.co.uk most useful websites
  
• Top youtube videos
• Free and essential apps
• Mix of apps and websites

How about I start my own "randomly useful" list?

• Yelp to search for restaurants, and other businesses
• blackviper for windows tuning (Windows Powertoys may help as well)
  

Speaking of Youtube, they have a number of different formats:

• Checkout this video with fmt=22. The specs are 1280 x 720, 30fps, 2000kbps video AVC, 232kbps audio AAC, 44.1khz stereo. Most videos don't support this yet or do not meet the (unknown) requirements. To embed youtube HD quality add &ap=%2526fmt%3D22 to the end of the embed code urls.
• Adding &fmt=6 to the end of any youtube video's url will give you Youtube's new high quality setting. 480 x 360 ~900 kbps 44.1KHz 96 kbps Mono CBR 30 fps Video Codec: Flash Sorenson Changing the number from 6 to something else yields different formats though it's not obvious which numbers work.
• Format 18 generates an mp4 using 512 kbps h264 at 24 fps with 44.1 kHz 128 kbps AAC stereo, which is compatible with video iPods. This is way better than using a service like vixy.net, which transcodes the crappy quality youtube vid into an mp4. Using fmt=18, you get a video transcoded from the original clip the user uploaded. The bitrate is lower on the mp4 version, but since the resolution is smaller it compensates. The h.264 codec has better looking videos at lower bitrates anyway. We finally see stereo on youtube with the mp4 version! It has a widescreen 16/9 aspect ratio rather than 4/3.
• Video downloaders like keepvid still work. Enter the url, click download, now grab the link and add &fmt=6 or &fmt=18 (for mp4) to the end. The good people at lifehacker created an easy to use firefox extension that will put a download link under each vid. You can also get the download url if you follow my wireshark tutorial but the process is pretty tedious. You can do it manually too, but it's annoying. Go to any video on youtube, right click then click view source. Click ctrl+F, which will open a searchbox and type &t=. Next copy the value after the t= but before any "&" characters. Grab that and the video_id and your set. The vid id is the v=something part of the url. Just copy the variables into the url below.